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Back Issues: Euro Double Vision

In his piece about the Eurovision Song Contest this week, Anthony Lane recalls the trend-setting stagecraft of the 1981 British entrant (and eventual winner) Bucks Fizz. About two-thirds of the way through their song, “Making Your Mind Up,” the two male singers in the group whipped the skirts off the two female members to reveal much shorter skirts underneath. I was fourteen and living in Northern Ireland at the time, and I’ll never forget the magician’s panache with which those garments were removed. How could they lose?

Elsewhere in his article, Lane considers the contest as an agent of European identity and unity:

If Eurovision were to conjure, on any regular basis, the kind of music that you can hear without wanting to staple your ears shut, the contest would lose its raison d’être. From the start, it has been goaded by the principle of the cuckoo clock, as explained by Orson Welles in “The Third Man.” Having pointed out that the great achievements of the Italian Renaissance were born from strife and bloodshed, Welles continues, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” That is the clock that ticks through Eurovision. It reassures us with a ringing message: the worse the songs, the more lasting and secure the peace will be.

This, in turn, recalled a Comment written by Clive James for for our 1997 Europe issue, in which Eurovision was also used as a touchstone for the continent’s post-Cold War zeitgeist:

In place of the conquerors’ fevered dream of a Europe united by the sword, the peaceful commercial republics of the New Europe make do with such cultural manifestations as the Eurovision Song Contest—a kitschy classic that every year draws a huge television audience, whose more sophisticated members amuse each other with jokes about how dumb it is. The jokes keep changing. For years, Norway’s songs reliably lost (“Norvége … nul points”); then they started winning. More recently, much derisive hilarity has attended the earnest efforts of Turkey. Between laughs, though, the less sophisticated but more thoughtful viewers should take heart: there was a time when the Turks stood at the gates of Vienna and bristled with the armed intention of getting into Europe by less tuneful means.

The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.